Top judge defends release of child killers

July 29 2002

England's most senior judge has defended the release of the killers of toddler James Bulger, saying everyone has rights and people should not forget that they were children when they committed a crime that shocked the world.

"Children can do things when they are children which they would never do in their later life," says Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, in an interview to be broadcast by BBC radio this week.

"I have insight into what happened to those two youngsters, because I saw reports which revealed how they developed while they were in custody. The reports illustrate that children grow up."

A copy of the transcript of the interview with Sue MacGregor has been released to The Telegraph in London and reported today.

In it Lord Woolf says: "What we have to realise is that everybody, except those who commit the most, most serious crimes, are eventually going to be let back into society."");document.write("

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Robert Thompson and Jon Venables - who will be 20 next month - were given indefinite sentences in 1993 for the abduction of James from a Merseyside shopping centre and his murder - which the trial judge described as "an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity".

Lord Woolf decided last year that they had served the punishment part of their sentences but said in the interview that time would tell whether they were no longer a danger to the public.

Explaining why he thought the courts had been right to grant them anonymity in the face of threats to their lives, Lord Woolf says: "It would not bring baby Bulger back to life if one or other of those young men had in turn been killed."

He says the Bulger case shows that everyone has rights.

"It does not matter what you have done: you are still a human being and you have rights - and nobody had the right unlawfully to forfeit their lives for what they had done."